As I was dropping my sons off at school one April morning this past spring and listening to the news, a play in the ultimate hypocrisy began to unfold on the radio. Here in the state of Idaho, a law was just shot down that would have made it possible for state benefits to be paid directly to the unborn child of an indigent woman, thereby granting the fetus “human” status and recognizing him as an individual legally. The law was voted against by those we have placed in office to protect each of us “legal humans”, and the influence that caused them to do this? Women’s Rights Advocates.
Upon hearing this and absorbing into my brain—which was numbed by the sheer lunacy of it all—I immediately went back to 1975. At the time, I was living in El Paso, TX, and only 9 years old. While playing with a neighbor friend, her mother came and said that it was time to go to their church. I looked at my friend. Church in the middle of the week? Oh well. I shrugged and prepared reluctantly to go home; my parents had taught me to respect the religious views of others. After all, my friend and I were not the same religion, so I figured maybe that was how they did it. Her mother smiled and explained that a Reverend from another state was coming to speak in a religious class their church offered, and that she wanted very much to go hear him. But since it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week in the middle of the summer, the church had set up a craft camp for the kids to go to while the moms listened to the lecture, so my friend had to go. Well that sounded like fun, and since we were already having such a good time together that I didn’t want to go home, and since my friend and her mother said I was welcome to go, I called for permission and was off to a protestant church for an afternoon of egg cartons, paint, and glitter.
Now I have long been a curious creature—a fact that has been both a blessing and a curse. My favorite phrases have always been questions: “I wonder why…” or “How come…” etc. However, I have never been a very good artist, and as such I quickly became frustrated with my clumsy efforts to make my project look like the teacher’s. I quietly snuck out of the gym and began to explore the church. I was inevitably drawn to the chapel where a kindly, distinguished looking man stood before a chalkboard and taught a lesson to the room full of mothers—of women. On the chalkboard was written a topic: “The final 10 signs of a society’s doom.” Ooooh…I felt a chill. Was this another lecture on the moon turning to blood? (I had been taught that some years earlier while living in northern Idaho that when the Big End Game was about to start, one of the signs would be the moon turning red as blood. To this day I will never forget my terror when some forest fires were burning, and while climbing into bed, I caught a glimpse of a dark, red-orange moon! It took my mom over an hour that night to calm me down! It carved itself into my brain, and I have never forgotten it. It comes to mind anytime I am thinking of Armageddon or similar topics, and I have to smile. Ah childhood!)
I was soon to realize that this was far worse than a bloody moon.
This reverend had approached the signs of the end times with a great deal of intelligence, and I was fascinated to watch. He had gone back and studied all of the great civilizations that had lived and died since the great Greek philosophers, and had found similarities in their respective demise. While there were many causes—both analogous and unique—within each society, there appeared to be at least 10 that were consistent within each one. My eyes scanned the list on the board, and even at the age of 9 I could see that most of them had already occurred within the ranks of my society and even before my short lifetime. That made me nervous.
But as I focused on the bottom two, I felt a sigh of relief. Surely I would never live to see them happen…they were just too hideous.
The second to the last sign of a doomed society was state-sanctioned perversion. He explained that this was when a state looked on acts of perversion such as homosexuality, pedophilia, prostitution, etc., as an acceptable way of life, and passed laws giving such individuals state recognition and protection. I remember thinking—in my 9 year old mind—Whew! That won’t happen in my lifetime, so I’m safe!
But it was the last sign that a society is lost that leaped out at me. It was 1975, and while I may have been only 9, I wasn’t deaf and blind. I had heard of things like abortion and a law called Roe v. Wade and groups who at the time called themselves “Pro Abortion” and “Anti-Abortion.” I remember my mom explaining what an abortion was, and my sick, instinctive horror at the thought of such an act, and inability to understand how the very ones who have the honor of taking God’s hand in the miracle of life—women—seemed to be the most in favor of it. It was incredulous to me as a child…actually, it is even more so now that I am a mother.
That final sign was the turning of the women within society against their own offspring and destroying them, physically and within the eyes of the lawgivers. The Reverend explained that all societies have corrupt men, and that God has always had women as the strong stabilizing force within the home, and the hope for a better future because they give—and mold–life. Women, he explained, were naturally more tender in their feelings than men, and so were children. Since he acknowledged that throughout history societies had been dominated by men and always would be, the weight of raising up these righteous men fell heavily upon the women, and that it was for this purpose that God had engrained women with such deep and ferocious senses of love, protection, and guiding of her offspring. God knew what we have come to know: that women and children do NOT always willingly follow men into evil deeds, but that men and children—and therefore, society–will ALWAYS follow the women into such ways. The short of it? If evil can get the women, it gets everyone.
I stood with saucer eyes and watched this man speak. He said that while he agreed that the state-authorizing of abortion was indeed a fulfillment of this repeated societal death knell, he said that there was something far more dangerous on the forefront. He said that the day would come when we would see mothers killing children who had already been born. In fact, he predicted that the day would come when actions such as strangling or abandoning newborns to die, murdering toddlers and older children would become so commonplace that they would eventually receive scarcely a mention in the newspaper. I remember a guffaw of disbelief rising from the women—this was just impossible to believe. And he ended his dissertation on this final, ghastly sign of a society’s fate by saying that this last step to our own destruction would eventually culminate in society’s women refusing to even acknowledge as human or worthy of consideration the fruit of her very own womb, and forcing those in power—the men—to mandate it. The reaction in that stuffy church in 1975 was one of women laughing at this absurd little man. The very idea!
The Reverend closed his lecture, and was given a polite round of applause, and the women began moving the still air as they chatted and went in search of their own precious offspring. But I was quiet. (Yes, you heard me right…I said quiet.) I stood back and observed these mothers, who were so devoted to their disbelief that they were laughing at the absurd extremes of what the Reverend had said. It has stayed in my mind for almost 30 years now that their disbelief wasn’t anything against the man who had delivered the message. No, it was the all too mortal trend of denying something that is just too horrible to comprehend. It sounded too awful; therefore it just couldn’t be true.
In the car on the way home, my friend was proudly displaying her craft item (better than mine, dammit!) and talking a mile a minute with her mother. But I never said a word as I looked out the window on the way home, trying to absorb, dissect, and apply what I had just learned. Something whispered to me that what that Reverend had said was true. My own religious teaching told me that once man starts to allow one evil, it is inevitable that others will follow because of our weak nature in this mortal veil. But I was human, and desperately needed to feel some hope, to rationalize how this would never—could never!–happen. Unfortunately, logic forbade that; as a lover of history, I knew of our tragic tendency to repeat it. The 10 signs the Reverend had laid out had happened to every society in history; we were not immune, and while I can’t remember the first 8 specifically, I will never forget those last two, because they were the ones that had yet to happen…at least so far as I knew all those years ago.
But my need for a hope for my future and that of my own offspring—an innate human requirement deep within our species—was very strong, so I comforted myself by thinking and then believing that while these last two signs may eventually happen, surely that final sign would not occur in my lifetime. This has worked only half-heartedly; I always had an ominous foreboding that this was not true, but until the early 1990’s—when reports of young girls hiding pregnancies and murdering newborns was so common it was relegated to a couple of paragraphs at the back of the paper, and mothers overwhelmed by stress and the evil it allows in began slaughtering children long since born—I could convince myself that the fantasy was true.
I’m not 9 anymore. I’m 37. I have no more fallacy of reality. We are deeply embedded in that final sign that rooted itself into my brain in a dusty chapel in a Wild West Town in 1975. I wish I knew that Reverend’s name. I wish I could remember all that he said that day. But perhaps I’ve remembered enough. I’ve remembered enough to recognize what he said was coming is now fully institutionalized. And now that I live in Idaho, in 2003, I have no more safe places. My own state—run mostly by men—has been influenced not by what is right, but by the wretched absurdity of Women’s Rights.
Before I sat down to write my thoughts about this momentous decision back in April, I checked out a Korean newspaper, as is my habit to do everyday, and was struck by this wretched irony.
In its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the State Department cited the North for continued extrajudicial killings and disappearances and the trafficking of women and young girls among the refugees and workers crossing the Chinese border. The report said that in women’s prisons, forced abortion and infanticides were standard practice. It pointed out that North Koreans are unable to change their government peacefully, and that the North’s leaders consider most accepted human rights norms, particularly individual rights, as “illegitimate, alien, and subversive to the goals of the state and the party.“ ChosunIlbo, April 1, 2003. “Human Rights Report Cites North’s Abuses”
This article speaks of women forced to abort and murder offspring, and the world mourns it as a heinous violation of many human beings. Yet in my country, in my state, women lobbied long and hard to stop a state from sending pre-natal aid to a human because it would give the child “human” and “legal” status—and by God, these givers of life weren’t about to allow so scandalous an act! (After all, think of the children! Isn’t this the liberal battlecry?) The women in North Korea are unable to change their government peacefully; the women in America did it with barely a ripple to the information super highway or a feeble “ahem” from the collective human conscience.
North Korea is the leader in the “axis of evil.” Not even Hitler was as brutal, and I never dreamed I would live to say that. But then again, there was a time I was sure I would never live to see this final, grisly sign, either. It has come to pass because women chose selfishness and hardened their hearts, and the men listened to the women.
This is NOT Women’s Rights; this is the ultimate act of hell-sanctioned Women’s Wrongs. God help us now…please, and hurry.
Keep the faith, bros, and in all things courage.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”